Mass grave filled with dozens of victims of Bosnian War ethnic cleansing found 20 years after brutal conflict that killed 100,000

One of the graves was discovered in Koricanske Stijene in central Bosnia, where more than 200 civilian men were executed

By Sam Webb

14th September 2017,8:12 am

Updated: 14th September 2017,8:59 am

MASS graves filled with the bodies of dozens of victims from Bosnia’s bloody 1990s civil war have been discovered.

One of the graves was discovered in the mountainous area of Koricanske Stijene in central Bosnia, where more than 200 civilian men were executed by Serb forces in August 1992 following their eviction from a northwestern region.

Around 2,600 Bosnian Muslims from Vlasenica were killed during the conflict

It marked one of the most brutal episodes in the inter-ethnic conflict, which lasted from 1992 to 1995 and killed around 100,000 people.
At the end of the war, 31,500 people were reported missing.

Since then, the remains of 25,000 victims have been exhumed from hundreds of mass graves, according to the Bosnian institute, leaving 6,500 unaccounted for.

The skeletal remains most likely belong to Bosnian Muslims.

Lejla Cengic, a spokeswoman for the Missing Persons Institute, said: “Since the beginning of the exhumation at Koricanske Stijene on September 7, about 40 clusters of human bones have been exhumed, essentially incomplete skeletons.”

She said identities would be determined by DNA testing, adding that the clusters did not necessarily correspond to the remains of the same number of people.

A man mourns next to the body of a civilian victim of the siege of Sarajevo who was killed by a sniper

After the breakup of Communist Yugoslavia in 1991 there were ethnic tensions between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats which eventually led to war.

Around 100,000 people were killed during the three-year conflict – mainly Muslim Bosniaks – and more than 2.2 million people were displaced, making it the most devastating conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

In addition, an estimated 12,000-20,000 women were raped, most of them Bosniak.

The war ended is December 1995 with a peace agreement signed in Paris.

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